Friday, August 17, 2007

-Contributions to biology/medicine

I just got the August 2007 issue of Physics Today and found something interesting to talk about.

On page 19, an article titled "Electric fields have potential as cancer treatment" talks about how common physics can be used in alternate fields, such as medicine and biology. Cancer is characterized by an uncontrolled production of cells, that is, the regulating mechanism for cell division stops working and therefore cells are produced in large quantities. Existing cancer treatments hamper cell division, but unfortunately they attack healthy cells too. Although the article discusses a model for Electric fields to work as cancer treatment, the final answer has yet to be known.

Whatever the answer is, this article shows how an understanding of the physical properties of biological entities can lead to the use of well known physics to contribute in new developments. For those thinking about biophysics, that is a great area to work in.